In the template under [themes] the author stands in [[ ]]. Which means it creates a link to another page, also if that page doesn't exist yet and also if the author's page does exist already, but the form of the name isn't identical. Is that on purpose? Wouldn't it be better to link only to existing pages?

As with the Wikipedia, links can be created for pages one can expect to be created eventually. Sometimes these links are variations on the name of people who already do have pages. When this situation is discovered one can either change the link to conform to the existing page name, create a new page that redirects to the existing page, OR if the existing page name does not match that found in the Wikipedia, a move of the page to a new one that matches the Wikipedia name can be made. This automatically creates a redirect to the new page on the old page. On the use of "~" : in the early stages of expanding Wikiquote, on many of the pages that aren't specific to an author, I was inclined to use the mdash "—" rather than the simple hyphen "-" before an authors name, but I noticed not all browsers on all Operating Systems handle this very well. I observed that the tilde did not seem to have such problems, and I thought it actually looked best of all the options in nearly all of the configurations that I tried, so I switched to that. ~ Kalki 12:06, 10 Oct 2004 (UTC)

My rough check of existing film and TV pages suggests most are following the organize-by-character, bulleted format, which is a logical extension of the prevailing Wikiquote individual-quote format for people and literary works. My own interest in quotations is primarily with dialog, so I guess I'm a point man for dissension on this approach. I get much of my own formatting ideas from IMDb, which is also focused on dialog, and my own MST3K quote project, which emphasizes connections to further information about quotes.

I have other biases, too, like including quotees' names, adding context for quotes that aren't pithy without it, extreme accuracy in text, organization that allows someone to find the scene quoted (i.e., chrono order and episode organization), and preferring Wiki markup to HTML wherever practical. These issues are not important to everyone. Furthermore, as I mentioned above, some of these quote pages are quite long, making the tables of contents extremely lengthy, causing editing and duplication difficulties, and motivating the creation of subpages.

All of this makes coming up with a single standard quite challenging. I've raised some of these issues before, but have found that the general Wikiquote community isn't the least bit interested in addressing film and TV quotation problems. (And don't get me started on how badly Wiki markup and styling treat dialog and poetry in general!) We are quite lucky that Kalki is an exception to this general disinterest.

I've been satisfied with the de facto practice of having organization and formats recommended and even enforced by those contributors most interested in (and, more importantly, conscientious about) maintaining each individual page. This is obviously not a satistfactory long-term approach, as opinions will eventually become heatedly opposed. So let's have a dialog on these issues, folks! ☺ — Jeff Q 04:05, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I agree that the time has probably come to narrow down the guidelines over the next few weeks, but there is no particular style that I would seek to mandate. The only styles that really irritate me, and I would like to exclude are those that use the asterisks to divide up dialog: they are far too confusing to the reader, and I think that these should probably be removed from any list of options that are available, and eventually from any pages where they occur.

Jeff Q's work at Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Blackadder is definitely among the best for episode presentations, and I generally prefer sequential presentation of quotes from TV episodes and films, but there are many pages where quotes by character are doing well and might be more appropriate. Alphabetizing some of the sections for these might be a good idea. One recommendation I think should be strongly emphasized is that the fact that a page is for quotations from a film, TV series, or book should be made plain at the top of the page; some people are creating pages and neglecting this, which can be especially confusing with less famous works, or works about historical figures. In closing I'll just state that I am a litle amazed that no one got around to doing a page for The Twilight Zone before I did; it was one of the shows I had in mind doing a bit of work on for quite some time, but kept forgetting about. ~ Kalki 21:56, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I agree with Kalki, time for recommendations has come and we need to make a decision soon on what format we will use.

A good experiment, how do we deal with Fight Club - a novel and a movie combined? RoboAction 06:25, 29 Nov 2004 (UTC)

When I started the Fight Club page, I only included quotes that were in both the novel and the movie (surprisingly, there were a lot taken verbatem from the novel for the film). It's possible that we could split the article, either in sections or into 2 articles, but because of all the verbatem lines it would become redundant to list them in both sections. Maybe 3 sections (a third section for shared lines) would be best? -- LGagnon(talk) 19:35, 29 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I concur that, at the very least, there should be separate common, book, and movie sections, if a quote page is used for both. Imagine how confused Starship Troopers, whose book and movie varied considerably, would be. Of course, another alternative is to provide separate "Title (book)" and "Title (film)" pages, especially for those stories whose content are significantly different between versions, as well as those who have multiple films and/or book editions. — Jeff Q 05:07, 30 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I'm not crazy about separating individual quotes from dialog, since the dialog format handles individual quotes perfectly well. The main arguments against the single format, I imagine, are that (1) individual quotes can follow established Wikiquote practice, and (2) the more popular dialog formats currently in use involve more formatting than ordinary quotes. But I would counter these with the following arguments:

Existing practice, even with books and general quotes, gets a bit complicated and visually unappealing already whenever adding extra stuff like multiple languages, explanations, contexts, etc. Even basic attributions tend to look (to my eye, at least) insufficiently distinguished from the actual quotes. (Enforced quote marks around the quotes doesn't help much, except for those contributors obsessed with pure text representation, something I think is a bit excessive for formatted-document media like Wikis.)

Having two sections with different formatting doesn't look as clean as one multipurpose format.

I can't argue that currently popular TV and movie quote dialog formatting is more involved than it should be, but this might eventually be fixed by adding Wikimedia formatting that specifically handles dialog, poetry, and other non-paragraphic, non-bulleted text.

I don't believe in manually-inserted HTML BReak tags. It's a tacky way to deal with formatted text, either using HTML or Wiki markup.

Those are my biases, but until there's a practical, consensual standard, I'll continue to use "Individual quotes" and "Notable dialog" sections in pages I don't create or maintain, where appropriate, and do pure dialog-style formatting in ones I do monitor carefully, so adding quotes can continue apace for all contributors. — Jeff Q 05:37, 30 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I've been browsing around the site attempting to find a pattern of the films we have, unfortunately non-was found. I created four examples (suprisingly these films were not created yet) of my POV on a possible layout/format (in no particular order):

Hi. I just got informed of this discussion. I think we should organize TV and movie under characters (if for TV we put quotes under episode, the list would be too long). For trilogies and remakes, we should have the movies and have sub-dividers for characters. However, if there is dialogue between characters, we should probably put it under the person who delivers the "punch". Keep me apprised.- B-101 20:21, 30 Nov 2004 (UTC)

In the process of reformatting and otherwise updating Firefly, I've come up with a mechanism to provide detailed usage information on the formatting discussed above, à laTalk:Buffy, but using subpages instead of talk pages. This is important for two reasons:

Talk pages are supposed to be reserved for chronological, signed commentary, whereas formatting instructions should be more like articles in that they are unattributed and reflect only the current consensus.

The "template" system currently in place doesn't provide an ideal forum for lengthy explanations of why various practices are in use, and the templates themselves are ugly and confusing, despite the best efforts of many experienced editors to make them useful.

I think the format of the existing Wikiquote:Templates page needs to be revisited. It's hard to read the monospaced text that runs right off the page, it's difficult to get explanatory text (about the template itself, that is) associated with each template without confusing editors, and having every template on a single page makes for a long, hard-to-read page. I think we should consider turning the Templates page into a list of individual template pages which can be copied-and-pasted in their entirety, plus an auxiliary page, possibly a separate /usage subpage, to explain how to use each template. A usage page separate from the talk page would eliminate a current problem we have with Buffy and many other highly-formatted articles: the formatting information, which is in a fixed location and can be modified by anyone, is on the Talk page, which is supposed to contain chronologically-ordered discussions where people only add to earlier comments and don't modify each other's contributions. This usage information, like other instructions, is something more akin to an article than a talk page (in that it only reflects the current state as opposed to a running dialog of commentary), but keeping it separate from but easily accessible by the template itself would allow us to provide a template page that is both readable (i.e., not monospaced) and easily copied for pasting into a new article, while avoiding the confusion of having visually similar template and usage information on the same page. — Jeff Q(talk) 13:07, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

Because of the likely imminent use of the new MediaWiki Inputbox feature to use templates to help editors create pages (see Creating new pages… below), I have taken bold action and created the following standalone templates from the existing ones in Wikiquote:Templates:

I recommend that we start using these new standalone templates as the official Wikiquote templates, making any edits to these pages and discussing genre-specific issues on their talk pages. We should remove the current ones from the main article; otherwise, we'll have to maintain two synchronized copies for each genre. In addition to making it easier for new users to follow official formatting practices, these new templates are better for two reasons:

They're easier to read, because they don't require "nowiki" and monospaced formatting in order to visually separate them from the rest of the article.

They provide separate talk pages for each genre, leaving more room for discussion for the many Wikiquotians only interested in certain genres. (Overall practices would still be discussed here, of course.)

I invite discussion from the community to consider these changes. Thank you. ~ Jeff Q(talk) 15:31, 11 August 2005 (UTC)

I support losing the inline templates. Does anyone think the inline templates are useful? ~ MosheZadka(Talk) 10:33, 21 August 2005 (UTC)

I agree with you on that - lose them --Master son 03:53, 30 May 2006 (UTC)

Please look at X-Men: The Last Stand. I did a major overhaul of it during the adding of quotes from the film. I would like to point out that a table looks just a bit cleaner and more manageable for the Cast than using lists with dashes between Actor and character. Wikipedia has used tables on a consistent basis for cast lists. Just my opinion. Please place your suggestions of others or recommendations on the article talk page. Thank you --Master son 03:53, 30 May 2006 (UTC)

Many people are having problems creating a new page. There has been some progress in this area (some FAQs posted with various tricks, help page failure allows starting a page with one click, etc.), but virtually no documentation regarding it. Input box is a new mediawiki feature intended to make article creation more streamlined, as well as helping create correctly boiler-plated articles. I have started a discussion, and a vote, at Help talk:Starting a new page, and I urge everyone interested to join it. ~ MosheZadka(Talk) 19:47, 3 August 2005 (UTC)

We've had a lot of discussion among the community and between individuals about the problems of separating segments of dialog. The currently recommended style uses a complex HTML tag for a half-width horizontal rule. Other common methods include using the full-width rule implemented with "----" wiki markup and adding extra space between lines. All of these methods have problems:

The wiki markup can't be differentiated from the H1 and H2 section headers in the default Monobook skin.

Extra spacing causes significant visual differences between different wiki skins, which encourages editors to revert each other's spacing changes to make the page look good for their view.

The half-width HR looks the same in all major skins, but is an ugly and undesirable use of HTML that not inconsquentially adds quite a sizeable chunk of text to many of our largest articles.

There is one other separator which I don't recall discussing for this purpose. (My apologies if someone had brought it up earlier.) I've used and at least implicitly recommended the following text to separate dialog segments that are connected but are only missing a line or two:

. . .

(Specifically, it's an indented ellipsis formed with space-separated periods to stretch it out to improve visibility.) This is based on the common in-quote separator […], which itself is based on the standard typographic ellipsis (…). These are unobtrusive and well-understood means of indicating missing dialog. When one of our newest editors, Xanadu, started using this exclusively in Absolutely Fabulous, it occurred to me that this might be an excellent alternative for a general dialog separator. In addition to being obvious and simple, it looks exactly the same in every MediaWiki skin. (I feel foolish for not having considered it earlier.)

The one disadvantage I see is that, like the half-width HRs, it causes a bit of visual confusion around section headers. The section header style uses less space around it than a standard line, so that the previous section's last dialog segment, the section header, and the first segment in the new section all look more connected than the other segments in that section. But this isn't a new problem, nor is it major, and it might eventually be fixed by global skin stylesheet changes. Am I missing something, or does this seem to anyone else as a vastly preferable alternative? ~ Jeff Q(talk) 23:09, 21 September 2005 (UTC)

From a purely visual perspective, I vastly prefer the half-hr. :... is great for marking omitting from the "same" quote, while hr signifies seperate quotes. The difference, from a semantic perspective, is whether each part is a good quote taken seperately. Especially for purposes like making a quote go into a fortune-like database, I'd like to keep the seperation simple. Sure, it uses ugly HTML markup, but it is still better than any alternative I've seen. ~ MosheZadka(Talk) 07:49, 22 September 2005 (UTC)

I have another suggestion, just to throw it out there (I have not thought a lot about it — there may be problems: ::—. An example follows ~ MosheZadka(Talk) 13:24, 29 September 2005 (UTC)

Character: Hello!

—

Character: Goodbye!

(end of example)

I like this option a lot (even though some really old browsers might not render "—" correctly). - dcljr 07:34, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

I must have missed Moshe's suggestion when he first posted it. It sounds quite promising. Instead of the wiki-deprecated &mdash; form (which is what is being discussed, for those readers who aren't editing this discussion to see the original embedded text), I'd recommend its UTF-8 equivalent —, which is the same character, but avoids the HTML character-entity syntax that some older browsers fail to render completely. The em-dash character is available in the character insertion box just below any edit window, after the accented characters and ligatures (immediately following the Æ-å section). Also, editors could just copy it from the format page or from another set of quotes, just like they can now. (I've used the em-dash character and its fellows en-dash [–] and ellipsis […] so often, my fingers have even "memorized" their respective Alt-0151, Alt-0150, and Alt-0133 key sequences under Windows (using the numeric keypad keys).) Lastly, when someone is editing a block of quotes, there's no mistaking the intent of something that looks like a divider, as opposed to the less-obvious &mdash; sequence. (Of course, that sequence isn't as bad as <hr width="50%"/>!)

I'm wondering if two em-dashes might look slightly better than one, especially since many quotes include em-dashes. Borrowing Moshe's example, the doubled-emdash looks like this:

I like that, but for pages that already use the NOTOC magic word (for those pages with hand-made TOCs) I like =====—===== even more. It provides visual separation, makes sense in the edited code, and also allows you to edit a single quote, or link to a single quote. I currently have my user pagethis page (thanks Jeff) set up as a copy of the Firefly page, except with this convention. Unfortunately, that doesn't work so well without the NOTOC magic word, because then it creates a nonsensical TOC. --Skrapion 06:28, 17 May 2006 (UTC)

Looking at the mark-up, you'll see there had to be a manually inserted Break and no returns between quote and any source comment, which is mildly difficult to read/edit. Further, the second line of the long comment is aligned with the quote, when we actually want a hanging indent. What we'd really need (if folk liked this look), is essentially a bullet in the shape of an m-dash. Could wiki mark-up do that? JackyR 15:55, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

It should be doable by changing the CSS "skins" used by MediaWiki, but browser support is inconsistent. (Of course, what's really needed is a Wiki system designed specifically for quotations—fat chance!) 121a0012 05:57, 26 February 2006 (UTC)

But do you like it? Is it worth going through the hassle of getting this to work technically? I guess this Q needs to sit a while for more people to see... JackyR 18:57, 26 February 2006 (UTC)

Have just realised the bleedin' obvious. The above format can be achieved using colons. No need for HTML breaks or continous lines.... Still has the hanging indent prob, but the markup is easy both to read and to reproduce. JackyR 17:10, 3 March 2006 (UTC)

Well, the basic reason we abuse the underlying HTML is that MediaWiki markup is designed for presentation, not semantic content. Many of the standard practices make use of HTML elements in ways that aren't very elegant. For instance, this indented discussion post, which follows the long-standing cross-project guideline described at Help:Talk page#Formatting, also uses the colon merely for indentation, not as a definition list. Since the focus of rendering Wikimedia pages is to provide a decent common style without making non-programmer editors go through coding hoops to achieve it, results are what counts. (As a programmer, I can empathize with the folks who look in horror at the page sources this generates.)

This problem is even worse for Wikiquote because MediaWiki has no markup designed for highly styled text like dialogs and poetry. It took us perhaps half a year to work out compromises that would yield a reasonable dialog format, and no one has come up with improvements since then.

I must say that the idea of using the full definition format does have some appeal. It handles four problems quite nicely:

It automatically bolds the speaker. (That's six characters we can happily lose.)

Unlike the current system, all the quoted text is nicely left-aligned.

Always starting the quote text at a 1-tab indent leaves more room for the text — sometimes a lot more.

The use of a block element like <dl> avoids the need to indent the speaker. (That particular inconvenience is solely in order to avoid sticking ugly <br/> tags at the end of each quoted line.

However, I can see some problems with this.

The worst is that it would double the vertical space needed for quotes, creating a lot of wasted whitespace and making already long pages much longer.

There are also many other jury-rigged aspects of dialog quoting that would probably have to be re-rigged to work within this system.

Still, I think this is worth investigating. Why don't you try it out on Cabin Boy, posting a note to its talk page about what you're doing? (You might instead experiment with a copy of it or another article on a subpage in your user space, so as not to upset folks who are trying to standarize articles. I'm somewhat philosophical about this myself, as we have far more format-cleanup work to do than we have people, but subpages are free and allow you to work undisturbed.) It would be best to try this system on a copy of a sizeable article that has complex aspects that may or may not break this formatting. Consider copying a small piece of the horrendously long Mystery Science Theater 3000. It has many occurences of:

People speaking as other people.

Segments of songs.

Explanatory notes.

Links within speaker and quote sections, which may jump to somewhere else in the article, a different article, or a page in a different project (usually Wikipedia; sometimes Wiktionary).

"Hover" notes that pop-up when you move your mouse over them (marked by "[N]").

I'm sure there are other potential problems, but my experience has been that if any problem with dialog formatting exists, an example of it can be found in MST3K. ~ Jeff Q(talk) 09:57, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

Good answer. Thanks for the response. I'll play around with it and see if I can find a balance between semantics and aesthetics.

The vertical-space probably could be solved with a change to the stylesheet by floating the <dt> elements to the left, but adding a colon to the term is not easy to do (well, I can do it on almost any browser except Internet Explorer without some Javascript hack). I can't get the Wikitext to attach a colon to the term without a <nowiki> tag or using an HTML entity, neither of which would be easy to type. (It would be something like :Person A&#58;: Dialog A) A template could solve the problem, but there would literally be thousands of transclusions of the template, and I'm not really sure how well MediaWiki handles repeated instances of a template (does it cache the template source, or would there be a database hit for each instance?).

I'm also curious as to why MediaWiki doesn't have markup for indenting without creating a list. If I were designing a markup language, a space would have been used for indenting and some other symbol would be for the pre-formatted block that space currently creates. (A part of me thinks that using a definition list to indent is just as bad as all the HTML people who used <blockquote> to do so.)

Turns out Cabin Boy is a bad place to start, as I can't figure out who said all but one of the quotes that were there. I did what I could (and added the most memorable quote I could remember). I'll find somewhere else to get started playing with markup. —TheMuuj 12:16, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

After failing to come up with a stylesheet that would make dialogue in a "proper" definition list, I decided to look around to see if anybody else had done anything successfully. After many reading through many debates about whether definition lists should be used for dialogue, I decided to consult the WHATWG preliminary spec for HTML 5, since they've been doing a good job at clarifying element semantics. According to the spec [2], definition lists are unordered lists that map names to one-or-more-values (more or less a multimap, if you're a programmer). Dialog is ordered, and should be marked up as such (even if it's styled without numbers). They have an example using ordered lists and block quotes [3]. I'll play with styling this type of list in my spare time, but this seems like it'd be pretty difficult on MediaWiki without templates and drastic additions to the stylesheets. So I'll have to play with it in pure HTML before I decide to do anything here. —TheMuujTalk 03:38, 25 August 2006 (UTC)